We buy trucks in Ironton

This is the St Francois Mountains, the exposed Precambrian igneous core of the Ozark dome, and it is the only place in Missouri where the quarrying is not carbonate rock. The stone here is rhyolite, granite and trap rock rather than the limestone and dolomite worked everywhere else in the state, and it is very much harder.

Both operations here work it. Trap Rock and Granite Quarries records 42 employees and sits 0.17 miles from the middle of town — among the five tightest matches between a record and its named place anywhere in this lane. Missouri Red Quarries records 8 and works dimension granite.

Hard igneous aggregate is denser and more abrasive than limestone, so a full body weighs more for the same volume and the material is harder on liners, tailgates and tyres. No wear figure is claimed for that, because the standard abrasion test measures how the rock degrades rather than how it wears steel. What can be said is that the rock here is different in kind from everything else in the state’s work, and a seller should say which one a machine carried.

That heavier material meets a road network with a restriction almost at the gate. Within ten miles there are 78 structures, seven carrying a posting and seven rated below legal loads. The nearest of those seven is 0.31 miles out — effectively part of the approach to the gate.

Only one of the seven is county-maintained. The lowest rating among them is 4.5 metric tonnes, below which nothing commercial crosses even empty, and the lowest that still takes a loaded truck is about 13.9 US tons — roughly 1.6 tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare. That crossing takes a truck across barely loaded.

Iron County restricts 8 of 40 county-maintained structures, 20.0 per cent against a state county rate of 12.7. Put the two halves together and the work here is heavier material on tighter routes than most of Missouri, which is a combination that shows up in brakes and running gear rather than on an odometer.

Those crossings are the local limit; the statutory ceiling is the same across the state.

Missouri sets gross weight at 80,000 lb, a single axle at 20,000 lb and a tandem at 34,000 lb, and it keeps the federal ceiling in place by providing that nothing in the section allows a load heavier than Title 23 of the United States Code does.

Then subsection 6 does something none of the other states on file do for this trade. Any vehicle or combination running on highways other than the interstate system may go over the single-axle, tandem-axle and gross limits by up to two thousand pounds — and that allowance names no commodity at all. Everywhere else the relief is written for somebody in particular. Tennessee’s ten per cent names sand, coal, clay, shale and phosphate, and leaves crushed stone out. Kentucky’s names crushed stone first. Alabama gives nobody anything. Missouri gives everybody two thousand pounds once you are off the interstate, which at 80,000 lb is about two and a half per cent.

One thing in that section is genuinely unsettled and we are not going to tidy it up. Subsection 6 says the allowance may be taken against the gross limit. Subsection 3’s own 80,000 lb cap is written as subject to subsections 9, 10, 12, 13 and 14, and it does not name subsection 6. Both texts are on the books, and how they work together is not something the research resolved.

The commodity allowances Missouri does write are all built the same way and all stop in the same place. Grain and grain co-products may run ten per cent over during harvest; milk and livestock may reach 85,500 lb; local log trucks reach 109,600 lb. Every one of them applies only on highways other than the interstate system. That is not a quirk of Missouri drafting. Title 23 caps the Interstate System at 80,000 lb and no state can raise it, so any state allowance above 80,000 lb has to live off the interstate by construction. The state route is the loaded road and the interstate is the empty one.

One more thing separates Missouri from its neighbours: it prices an overload rather than stopping it. The fine runs by the pound on a rising scale — two cents for each pound of the first five hundred, five cents to a thousand, ten cents above that. What the section does not carry is a do-not-move rule. Tennessee makes it separately unlawful to move an overloaded truck until the load comes off, so an overweight truck there stops where it stands. Missouri lets it carry on and sends a bill. Those are different risks, and over a few years they produce different loading habits and a differently worn truck.

RSMo §§ 304.180 and 304.240; 23 U.S.C. § 127. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond weight, the paperwork comes down to a single sentence.

We need a title — unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Everything after that sentence is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. Both are ordinary and neither one stops a sale.

Missouri’s salvage rule is worth a minute because it reaches almost nothing in the stock we buy. A vehicle is branded salvage only where the cost of repairs exceeds eighty per cent of the fair market value immediately before the damage, and where the damage happened no more than six years after the manufacturer’s model year designation. Both limbs have to be met, not either one.

Both numbers are outliers, and they pull the same way. Eighty per cent is the highest threshold on file — Kentucky, Alabama and Tennessee all brand at seventy-five. Six model years is the shortest age window found anywhere; Arkansas runs seven and Tennessee ten. Past that window the Missouri rule does not reach a vehicle at all, however badly it was damaged. For a used commercial truck the age limb is nearly always the operative one and the percentage nearly never is.

The repair side leaves out more here than in any other state on file: inflatable safety restraints, tires, sound systems, damage from hail, and sales tax on parts and materials. Kentucky excludes airbag reinstallation and nothing else. Two states can share a threshold and still be adding up different repair bills.

Where the brand does land, Missouri applies it on the way out rather than on the way in. A salvage vehicle is retitled only after an examination recorded on Form 551, carried out by an inspector of the Missouri State Highway Patrol or by the St. Louis city or county auto theft unit, and that certificate runs out six months from the date of inspection. The title issued afterwards carries the words PRIOR SALVAGE. Minnesota uses the same two words for the opposite end of the process, branding on acquisition; the same phrase means an incoming obligation in one state and an outgoing designation in the other.

RSMo § 301.010; Missouri Department of Revenue Form 551. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule was last checked.

All of that is equipment we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the granite and the trap rock. Day cabs and road tractors for the runs out of the hills. Flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew. Around the Trap Rock workings, and across Iron County, this town turns over a steady amount of it.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. We can come to you and drive it away, come to you and tow it, or buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody visiting at all.

• Does it have to run?No. It does have to be complete — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Rust is not a disqualifier.
• It carried granite rather than limestone.Worth saying, and this is one of the few places in the state where it comes up. Hard igneous rock is denser and more abrasive, so a full body weighs more and it is harder on liners, tailgates and tyres. It does not change whether we buy it.
• The crossings round here are right on the gate.The nearest restricted one is about a third of a mile out, which is closer than anywhere else we have looked at in this state. It shapes the routing rather than stopping the work.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Lost titles have a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route. Neither one stops a sale.
• Do you come out?Yes. We can come to you and drive it away, come to you and tow it, or buy it remotely and arrange the tow with no visit at all.
• How far out do you come?All of Iron County and the ones around it, Reynolds County and Madison County included. Distance has never stopped a sale.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup.

Beyond a pit working out, the reasons are mostly personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A partnership splitting and the equipment with it. A truck that stopped earning and has been sitting since, where every month it sits is another month of insurance on something that isn’t turning a wheel.

Most of those aren’t happy reasons, and we don’t treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone by the end of the week. That’s what we’re here for. Around the granite quarries, and across Iron County and Reynolds County, there is usually one sitting.